One cannot find any evidence that she made a study of verse-making, not even possessing “Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary.” Her powers were cultivated mainly by reading the poetry of others and unconsciously catching their spirit and metre. Her ear for music helped her more than her knowledge of tetrameters or hexameters.
The most important results of these years were the development of her self-reliance and sweetness, the stirring up of her ambitions to win an education, and the dawnings of her spiritual life. She was laying up stores of impressions and memories, also, that were to be permanently preserved in her more finished poems of later years. The imagery of her maturer verse recalls her early days, when in the freedom of childhood she roamed the fields and the woods, and lived on the banks of the Merrimac. We see her youth again through her reminiscences of the barberry cluster sweetened by the frost; the evening primrose; roses wet with briny spray; the woodbine clambering up the cliff; heaps of clover hay; breezes laden with some rare wood scent; the varied intonations of the wind; hieroglyphic lichens on the rocks; the mower whistling from the land; the white feet of the children pattering on the sand; the one aged tree on the mountain-top, wrestling with the storm wind; the candles lighted at sunset in the gambrel-roofed houses; the lightning glaring in the face of the drowning sailor; the tragedy of unconscious widowhood; the mill-wheel, the hidden power of the mill, with its great dripping spokes; and the mystery of meeting and blending horizons.
In the spring of 1846 the scene of Lucy Larcom’s life was changed, when her sister Emeline married, and went to seek a home in the West, for she shared with the new family their pioneer life in Illinois. A few days before they started on their journey, she wrote some lines of farewell in her scribbling-book, which show that she was beginning to use real experiences for the subject of her verses.
“Farewell to thee, New England!
Thou mother, whose kind arm
Hath e’er been circled round me,
The stern and yet the warm.
Farewell! thou little village,
My birthplace and my home,
Along whose rocky border